Was It Love? The ‘Manacled Mormon’ and His Kinky Weekend

Tabloid

By virtue of its title alone, “Tabloid,” Errol Morris’s astonishing new documentary, achieves a degree of serendipitous timeliness. Mr. Morris, as usual unseen, though occasionally heard shouting questions from off screen, trains his prying, voracious eyes on England in the 1970s. It was a time ripe with newspaper sleaze that offered premonitions of the present day, even as the prevailing vices, carnal and journalistic, may seem quaint by current standards.

Although Mr. Morris caters to our never-sated appetite for titillating tidbits — and lets us take a few nips at the ink-stained hands that feed us those shocking, nasty morsels —in “Tabloid” he also offers a bit of escapism. We can turn away from the ugly spectacle of cellphone hacking and political bullying currently roiling Rupert Murdoch’s empire and revisit the once-notorious case of the “Manacled Mormon,” which long ago offered the British reading public a bit of good, clean, dirty fun.

You may well ask: the case of the what? Back in 1977 or so, any reader of The Daily Mirror or The Daily Express — two British tabloids scrapping over the news like dogs with a squeaky toy — could have reeled off the scandalous details. A pear-shaped American Mormon missionary named Kirk Anderson had been abducted, possibly at gunpoint, and taken to a cottage in Devon. There he was shackled to a bed and subjected to three days of kinky sex with Joyce McKinney, a fellow American, originally from North Carolina, who claimed to have done it all for love.

Ms. McKinney’s kidnapping trial was a headline writer’s dream, and she proved to be an ideal tabloid subject: pretty, talkative and (depending on the paper and the week) either a wronged Southern belle or a devious femme fatale. She claimed that what happened in the cottage was consensual and that she had traveled to England in the company of a few other men to rescue her fiancé, who had been brainwashed and spirited away from her by unscrupulous religious authorities. Things only got weirder from there.

As is often the case with such tales, a sudden and sustained frenzy of attention was followed by a drop into oblivion that was almost as precipitous. The less you know about Ms. McKinney, the more you are likely to enjoy “Tabloid,” which consists of about 90 minutes in her company supplemented by helpful commentary from a few other interested parties: two leathery Fleet Street journalists who contributed to her notoriety; a pilot who accompanied her on her fateful trip to England; a young former Mormon with a clear grasp of Latter-day Saints theology; and a South Korean scientist who pioneered the cloning of dogs. The story unfolds through wide-screen talking-head discourses and archival montages, propelled by John Kusiak’s antic, I-dare-you-not-to-think-of-Philip-Glass score.

Mr. Anderson declined to be interviewed — a perfectly understandable decision in the circumstances and one that has the effect of both limiting and deepening Mr. Morris’s tale. If “Tabloid” were structured as a “he said/she said” account of Mr. Anderson’s bondage, we would have more information but also less mystery. Instead of forensics, we are treated to amour fou, a chronicle of grand, romantic passion all the more fascinating for being one-sided. Did Mr. Anderson requite Ms. McKinney’s love, as she insists? And if not, what possessed her to do what she did? These are not the kind of questions that have empirical answers.

Mr. Morris is an intrepid hunter of facts, but he is more fundamentally a collector of souls, a description that I mean to sound both exalted and a bit ghoulish. “What happened?” is, for him, a question often freighted with ambiguity but not necessarily unknowable. He is enough of a positivist to believe that the truth is out there somewhere, and in his most famous film, “The Thin Blue Line,” he found exactly where it was hidden.

“Who are you?,” on the other hand, is an inquiry that plunges this obsessive rationalist — or rational obsessive, if you prefer — down a rabbit hole of indeterminacy. Over four decades and scores of cinematic interrogations, Mr. Morris has developed a knack for finding that zone in each person’s character where lucidity intersects with delusion and where the urge to perform collides with the impulse to dissemble. People seem to be inventing themselves in front of his camera and then, a moment later, unmaking themselves.

Photo

Joyce Mckinney, the subject of the documentary "Tabloid."Credit
Sundance Selects

Ms. McKinney, with her lilting accent and friendly manner, her buoyant laugh and ready tears, seems almost too good an interlocutor for this filmmaker. The fact that she is currently complaining about his depiction of her can’t quite dispel — indeed, might confirm — the absurd, gnawing suspicion that her life has been one long audition for an Errol Morris film.

Not that “Tabloid” represents her first exposure to a curious camera. Tucked amid the interviews are old photographs and television clips and, most remarkably, 16-millimeter footage shot by Trent Harris, in which a young Ms. McKinney, back from England in full Stevie Nicks pre-Raphaelite soft focus, breathily promotes a fairy tale memoir of her romance with Mr. Anderson.

Are you wondering about the dog cloning? Many years after the Devon cottage caper, Ms. McKinney returned to the public eye when she traveled to South Korea to clone her beloved pit bull, Booger. She was initially outraged when some journalists connected that episode with her earlier moment of fame, going so far as to threaten legal action against anyone who pointed out that she was that Joyce McKinney.

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“I don’t see the connection between cloned dogs and a 32-year-old sex-in-chains story” she says, in all innocence.

And who would, except perhaps Mr. Morris? The sheer heterogeneity of human experience is one of his enduring preoccupations, and he has found, once again, an impossible and perfect embodiment of just how curious our species can be.

At one point Ms. McKinney refers to her years of professional stage training, and one of the tantalizing conundrums in “Tabloid” is whether she is a brilliant performer — a conceptual artist of her own life — or, as one of the British hacks has it, just “barking mad.”

This may be a distinction without too much difference, since the relentless force of her personality has the effect of overwhelming clinical or ethical judgment. She is crazily convincing, and also convincingly crazy. Mr. Morris, now and then exclaiming in disbelief from beyond the frame, feeds her plenty of rope, and she proceeds to tie him, herself and anyone else who happens to be watching in knots. She is a master of epistemological S-and-M, or maybe just very good at roleplaying.

Opens on Friday in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, Salt Lake City and Minneapolis.

Directed by Errol Morris; director of photography, Robert Chappell; edited by Grant Surmi; music by John Kusiak; production design by Steve Hardie; produced by Julie Bilson Ahlberg and Mark Lipson; released by Sundance Selects. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes.

A version of this review appears in print on July 15, 2011, on Page C8 of the New York edition with the headline: Was It Love? The ‘Manacled Mormon’ and His Kinky Weekend. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe